Monday, 19 May 2008

The funny thing about blogging, at least for me, is that I never know where everything is going to take me next. Here I have my dear friend John Butterworth, painter and soul-mate who is presiding over the page and with the steely gaze, so characteristic of him, seems to be overseeing the proceedings of what is going on below, namely that the students do their tasks properly, that everyone concentrates and produce the best possible art; things like that. It all sounds impossible at first but once the images start coming there is no stopping them.

Here they are, buzzing like mad bees trying to work the shading and proper proportions on a large beauty who is pretending to be asleep. It's all in day's work at Cant College during art class. They all are very mindful of Johnny B who is presiding like an overlord from the top of this page.

Back in the old days, when I was learning the visual trade, I knocked on many doors and became a printing press operator for a while. At the same time I was developing and printing my photographs in the bathroom at home most nights. Some mornings I would go to work and, between breaks, managed to sneak in an image here and an image there. This silhouette, taken one morning against a window in a hotel room in Quebec City, is one is one of the few remaining prints from that special time of my life when I was officially undocumented but unofficially free in more ways than one.

Sometimes there is something eery in images that are truncated by reason of being the very last frame of a roll. This a is a good example of that. Add to that the fact that it is slightly underexposed and voila!, the normal will turn paranormal and the visit to the park will become a frame by frame account of a scene stolen from Hitchcock.

This lonely dude all naked and ruthlessly ignored by passerby remains for days on end in his ballet position behind the glass plate of an empty art gallery somewhere in the center of Paris. Is he, somehow, an understudy for some of our lonely moments?